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How do you write a daily report of a war which continues to drag on until it feels as though there really isn't anything to write about? And I guess that there's an additional question: Why write about a war that drags on until there really isn't anything to report? I think the "why" question is actually rather easy to answer. We expect wars to be filled with danger and excitement, or at the very least eventful. There's probably no lack of reports of this sort. I think it's important to give voice to the banal, to the daily grind. I don't know how well I actually do this, but at least I try.
As far as alerts were concerned, today was a regular, or perhaps moderate, day. We didn't have any alerts during the night, and I got up relatively early to be at the college for four hours, until noon. During which time there was only one alert - at 10:30. I was on the phone with a lecturer, trying to help her arrange her Zoom meetings for that afternoon. She had a siren (or at least said she did) so we ended our conversation before I had a chance to finish helping her. Then, on the way home my phone gave me a ten minute alert. I was about ten minutes from home, and this wasn't a get-safe-now siren, so I continued driving. But I did switch from listening to jazz on Spotify to a radio station that reported which places should take cover, which wasn't where I was. When I got home, however, I stopped to pick up Tzippi and bring her to the chadar ochel for us to take food home, and when I phoned her she said that the kibbutz had had a siren and that she'd just left our safe room. There was another preliminary alert at 15:00 that disturbed our naps. The television was open around 18:15 and I was watching Trump's press conference (no, I don't know why) when the news reported a direct hit on a house in Nahariya in the north. Had the television not been open I wouldn't have known about this until the evening news. The last alert (so far) was at 21:00, and it was swiftly followed by a get-to-your-safe-rooms siren where we sat for about ten minutes. When we got to the safe room I turn Tzippi's computer on to view the news. The military correspondent reported that most of the missiles had been intercepted. He also told us that there were three in that particular barrage. I suppose that two out of three is "most", but it's a strange way of reporting it.
Today's work was distinctly war related. That's been true for the past couple of weeks, but even more so today. Classes at the college are being conducted fully via Zoom, and there are a number of lecturers who have waited until the last minute to set up their accounts and put the links to the meetings in their Moodle courses. And I guess that it's to be expected that most of those who wait for the last minute are those who are seriously technologically challenged. That means that helping them over the phone is often super difficult, and today it was super frustrating. Since last Wednesday I've been trying to arrange this for one particular course, but the secretariat of that unit couldn't arrange things properly for the course to show up in our LMS, and when today it finally did the lecturer basically had no idea what she was supposed to do. I was relieved that I worked things out just before heading for home at noon, but a bit after 17:00 I received a phone call from her, asking me why she could share her PowerPoint presentation to her students. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that she'd entered the wrong course where she didn't have hosting rights, and it took me an additional ten to explain to her where the correct course was and then how to invite the students. This should have been a rather quiet day, but it turned out that I was frustratingly busy throughout.
It's not only lecturers who have no idea what they're doing. It's also politicians. Though Trump wants to tell us that he's already won the war and that it will soon be over, we're being told here that it can continue for a number of weeks (and that's not counting the ground troops that are now in Lebanon). All this, of course, is without an end plan, but we're pretty used to this already. I'm not sure how I stumbled onto an article by Bobby Ghosh - a journalist whom I wasn't familiar with: Iran Is Fighting This War to Prevent the Next One. It's quite similar in its conclusions to one by Tzvi Bar'el in HaAretz from a couple of days ago: Iran Needs Not to Lose to Win the War. The U.S. and Israel Need Total Victory (https://archive.li/Qdow6). Both of them suggest that we'll probably be having numerous additional days of occasional missiles for me to continue to write about.
As is now customary, I'm now after my shower which I went to after turning the television off at 01:10. The news had just reported an intercepted missile in the north. We didn't get any sort of announcement here. So this is a good time to sign off.
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